Ma Qiusha The Mirror(scape) of Your Skin Longlati Foundation
In the single-channel video All My Sharpness Comes from Your Hardness (2011), a pair of feet shod in ice skates dangle from the back of a moving bicycle. The rest of the body is out of shot; the blades of the skates scrape the road surface, sometimes creating sparks as if they are being sharpened. This is one of Ma Qiusha’s earlier works included in an exhibition that brings together videos, paintings and photography made between 2011 and 2022.
All My Sharpness… reminds me of another work of Ma’s that isn’t included in the exhibi-tion: From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili (2007), in which the artist talks to camera about her mother; she holds a shaving blade in her mouth while she speaks, causing blood to drip past her lips. Ma’s reflections on her upbringing and the kind of ‘tough love’ meted out by Chinese parents isn’t exactly a strange concept here – at least not to many audiences with Asian heritage – but by using such graphic visuals and incisive language, repressed emotions burst forth in unnerving and violent confrontation. During this early period of her practice, Ma took an almost savage approach to trans-lating her personal relationships and experiences of conflict.
Ma’s most recent works could be described as just as emotionally fuelled, yet more restrained in their aesthetic. Three installations from the series Wonderland (2019–22) occupy most of the exhibition space. Broken shards of cement, each shattered piece wrapped with nylon stocking material, are assembled into jigsaw like compositions installed on the wall and floor. While stockings are often worn for modesty, they are also associated with the fetishisation and objectification of women. Here the artist nods to that last while also winking (in part thanks to the installation’s monumental scale) towards the patriarchal, concrete jungles that increasingly make up the landscape of contemporary China. Wonderland appears to fill the room in silent protest.
Ma’s more visceral rage, however, seems to resurface in one corner of the exhibition space, in the two-channel video Take a Walk (2016). Each channel appears (almost) to mirror the other: a naked woman walks on a lawn, a metal chain dangling like a leash from her neck and held by an invisible hand. The women are anonymous, their heads and necks out of the frame. The question of who is being taken for a walk by whom goes unanswered (though one can infer from the visuals alone that there are power dynamics at play) and becomes more chilling when seen in light of the ‘Xuzhou chained woman incident’, a case of abuse and human-trafficking that came to public attention in January this year. While Ma’s work speaks to the universal experience of abuse against women, it is at its most potent when its metaphorical messages reflect actual experience.
This article is included in ArtReview Asia 2022 Winter Issue.